The Copyright of the The Copenhagen Diagnosis

Readers may recall The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a (so-to-speak) non-governmental international climate assessment published in November 2009 and targeted by activists at influencing deliberations at the Copenhagen conference. Because it coincided with Climategate, it received little-to-no critical attention at climate blogs. Thus, I suspect that few, if any readers, will (without peeking) be able to guess the answer to today’s trivia question about The Copenhagen Diagnosis: who holds the copyright to The Copenhagen Diagnosis itself?

The surprising answer is that the copyright to The Copenhagen Diagnosis is the sub-charterer of the Ship of Fools: the University of New South Wales (click on image at left for enlargement of the frontispiece). Out of all the universities and institutions in the world, why the University of New South Wales? Dunno.

The ostensible purpose of The Copenhagen Diagnosis was as follows:

The purpose of this report is to synthesize the most policy-relevant climate science published since the close-off of material for the last IPCC report. The rationale is two-fold. Firstly, this report serves as an interim evaluation of the evolving science midway through an IPCC cycle – IPCC AR5 is not due for completion until 2013. Secondly, and most importantly, the report serves as a handbook of science updates that supplements the IPCC AR4 in time for Copenhagen in December, 2009, and any national or international climate change policy negotiations that follow.

Its co-authors included both Real Climate bloggers (Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf, Eric Steig) as well as University of New South Wales academics (Matthew England, Steven Sherwood, Ben McNeill, Andrew Pitman), Turney’s University of Exeter associate Peter Cox and longtime activists such as Stephen Schneider, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Andrew Weaver and Richard Somerville). The document itself contained no information on sources of funding.

Some of the authors appear to have also been involved with the large consciousness-raising conference of climate scientists in Copenhagen in March 2009 – see its Synthesis Report also bearing Copenhagen in its title (Richardson, K. et al., (2009) Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions. Synthesis Report of the Copenhagen Climate Congress. (University of Copenhagen), a report that was cited by The Copenhagen Diagnosis. Turney, then still at the University of Exeter, was a session chair at the March 2009 conference, as was Matthew England of the University of New South Wales, both subsequently (July 2010) recipients of lucrative ($3 million) Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowships. Curiously, Turney made an initial appearance in Climategate documents in March 2009, writing to Jones and Briffa about a scheme to get UKP 3 million in NERC funding, a topic that I’ll return to in a later post.

“Antarctica is also losing ice mass at an increasing rate, mostly from the West Antarctic ice sheet
due to increased ice flow. Antarctica is currently contributing to sea level rise at a rate nearly
equal to Greenland.”

Could you offer some real credible evidence for this – given the fact that the fiasco last month with several ice breakers becoming stuck in abnormally thick ice. Antarctica losing ice mass? Are you paid to spread this rubbish or are you a willfully deceived.

There’s a need to differentiate between the ice from glaciers & sea ice. The Antarctic ice-loss as reported, is from the icecap, ie glacial.
We’re supposed to believe that this melt, is cooling the seas around Antactica, thus causing more sea ice to form.

A bit surprising to find them recognizing temperature change precedes CO2 change (p.44, just following the Mannian Figure 19):
“Temperature warming typically comes before increases in atmospheric CO2 over the ice-core record. This finding is consistent with the view that natural CO2 variations constitute a feedback in the glacial-interglacial
cycle rather than a primary cause (Shackleton 2000);
something that has recently been explained in detail with the
help of climate model experiments (Ganopolski and Roche 2009).”

My first thought was that the copyright would be held by some alarmist university or other. So I plumped for the usual suspects, UEA. Oh well, it was a decent try… If only Turney had been affiliated with UEA rather than University of Exeter (which just happens to be where my Ph.D. is from).

As they say sunlight is the best disinfectant. It’s clear that UNSW has been a hotspot for “alarmists” for some time and the more sunlight that can be brought to bear on this group and their questionable scientific persuasion the better. You should also not forget their convenient little propaganda arm Deltoid, run by a colleague down the corridor.

Back in “Upside Down Mann,” where dbstealy just posted on the credentials of a trollish Mr. Meisler, Steve wrote, “I haven’t yet written about EPA’s reliance on Upside-Down Mann in their response to the Petition for Reconsideration, but it’s an amusing incident as well.”

That sounds like a wonderful topic. I’m wondering, Steve, if you’ll post on that.

I well remember the pre-Copenhagen foreplay conducted by the “large consciousness-raising conference of climate scientists” in March 2009. George Monbiot went there and reported on it in the Guardian.http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/climate-change-copenhagen-monbiot?commentpage=9
He went by train at his own cost (£600) to spare the world his carbon footprint and announced on his return that the whispers he’d heard from the scientists indicated that it was worse than we thought. This moved me to make a comment which (miraculously) hasn’t been moderated:
In the night-train that left Copenhagen
George announced to the sleeping Schlafwagen
(to thunderous applause):
“I’ve just wet my drawers
And bullsh*tted myself, into the bargain”.